Sports Radio Interviews

Gregg Williams is the best $250,000 investment Sean Payton has ever made

Gregg Williams got a lot of heat before the Super Bowl for his comments about hitting Peyton Manning and how to slow him down. It’s not every day you hear a coach come out and talk about making the quarterback pay on every play. Well, maybe it wasn’t the pounding that won the Saints the game, but his defensive strategy could have won him the MVP for the Super Bowl. In the second half of the Super Bowl, Williams mixed it up with 3 and 4 down linemen, mixing in 3 and 4 linebackers and continuously disguising the blitz pressure to the point that Manning, and his receivers looked confused at times. A Peyton Manning led offense confused? That’s good enough for me to give him the MVP trophy. Just ask Tracey Porter who after the game admitted Williams showed them the interception play on tape and he saw it coming. He jumped the route and that realistically put the game out of reach. Maybe the gutsiest call of any Super Bowl or big game I have ever seen was the onside kick to start the second half, but Payton went and asked Williams at halftime about the call before it happened. Williams backed up his head coach and told him to go for it. That play turned out to be the momentum shifter for the game.

Even better is the Williams hiring story by Sean Payton. How many times in sports these days do you hear a coach giving up salary to hire another coach? That’s a story by itself. Payton looks like a genius now doesn’t he? For a measly $250,000 of his salary to go towards Gregg Williams’ first year paycheck, just in order to land the defensive coordinator. A great story that you don’t normally hear about turns out to be a very smart one.

Gregg Williams joined the Stephen A. Smith Show on Fox Sports Radio and talked about the win in the Super Bowl, defending Peyton Manning and the onside kick that shocked the world.

Smith told him he didn’t think he could hold the Colts to 17 points and how did he actually get it done:

“You and about 700 other people out there in the field. You know what we use that stuff as motivation. I know I coach better with a chip on my shoulder. We were just able to play pretty well tonight. Make no bones about it, Peyton (Manning) has had some great games against us, against me and against the defenses I have coached. We were able to make some plays, our guys bought into the plan to change things up. We could not be a static defense and play the same old defense over and over again.”

Smith then asked what was the plan:

“The plan was to use very bullet we had. One of the things we wanted to come out in the first quarter was to  play our 3-4 package and our three package. In the second quarter we switched back to our 4-3 package and our nickel package. In the third quarter we were going to try to mix back and forth and in the fourth quarter we saved a bunch of pressures that we had not shown in the first half. We saved a lot of pressures for the fourth quarter that we didn’t want him to see to get a chance to get an adjustment on. So that was part of the plan as long as the score cooperated we could hold that plan. Now if the score got out of touch, then we had to use evertyhing we had to use to stay in the game.”

Smith asked what did this win mean for the city of New Orleans:

“It really means everything to the city of New Orleans. They adopted me a year ago and I am so happy for that whole region of the country. To be able to bring a championship with all the suffering that has gone on down there. Off the field and on the field, the Saints organization waiting 43 years to get to this, the Benson Family. More importantly the whole city of New Orleans, its awful important that we bring this back to them and I was very happy to be able to be a part of it. They let me become a part of it.”

Listen to Gregg Williams with Stephen A. Smith on Fox Sports Radio (3:45 into podcast)

Tags: Gregg Williams, Indianapolis Colts, New Orleans Saints, Peyton Manning, Sean Payton, Super Bowl XLIV, Tracey Porter